Read the Web
Research Project at Carnegie Mellon University

NELL: Never-Ending Language Learning

Browse the Knowledge Base!

Can computers learn to read? We think so. "Read the Web" is a research project that attempts to create a computer system that learns over time to read the web. Since January 2010, our computer system called NELL (Never-Ending Language Learner) has been running continuously, attempting to perform two tasks each day:

• First, it attempts to "read," or extract facts from text found in hundreds of millions of web pages (e.g., playsInstrument(George_Harrison, guitar)).
• Second, it attempts to improve its reading competence, so that tomorrow it can extract more facts from the web, more accurately.

So far, NELL has accumulated over 50 million candidate beliefs by reading the web, and it is considering these at different levels of confidence. NELL has high confidence in 2,810,379 of these beliefs — these are displayed on this website. It is not perfect, but NELL is learning. You can track NELL's progress below or @cmunell on Twitter, browse and download its knowledge base, read more about our technical approach, or join the discussion group.

Recently-Learned Facts

instance	iteration	date learned	confidence
n06_18_2005 is a dataset used within the scientific field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
n8_00_9_00_am is a time	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
example_29 is a musical artist	1111	06-jul-2018	98.7
charles_harris is a Mexican person	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
lymph_nodes_hurt is a lymph node	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
neurontin is a drug worked on by pfizer	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
n12_51_pm is the time of the event n2011_christchurch_earthquake	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
residence_inn_beverly_hills is a hotel in the city los_angeles_ca	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
elizabeth has husband edwards	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9
andrew is a person who moved to the state california	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0